Please Don’t Eat My Mother (1973, Carl Monson)

I don’t even know where to start mocking Please Don’t Eat My Mother. There are just too many places to start… first probably should be the pacing. Mother is a softcore–but seventies softcore, which isn’t particularly soft–remake of The Little Shop of Horrors. Buck Kartalian plays the protagonist, a peeping tom with an overbearing mother (Lynn Lundgren) who gets himself a giant man-eating plant. In between feeding the plant, he peeps on couples getting it on.

Now, if I can follow Mother‘s present action–it’s hard with Jack Beckett’s inept photography (the picture has the worst day for night photography ever)–it takes place over many weeks. Even if Kartalian has only one outfit in the entire thing. But there are only three couples Kartalian peeps on–some of them are getting it on for what must be weeks. It’d be hilarious if Monson and the script acknowledged it; Mother‘s internal “reality” does it no favors.

Compared to Lundgren as the mother, Kartalian practically gives a good performance. Maybe the best performance in Mother comes from Rene Bond, playing a comically suffering wife. She can actually deliver the dialogue. Most of the other actors can’t.

The film manages to be homophobic, misogynistic, anti-Semitic (though the anti-Semitism is supposed to be a joke) and so probably some other things. It’s also rather boring to talk about, which–based on the description–is unexpected.